Love is the crown jewel among the graces of the Christian life. We know it and perpetually forget it. We see the very incarnation of God’s love in the Gospel portrait of Christ, we behold him as he first washes the disciples’ feet and then mounts the cross to wash their souls. But hardly has the memory of this transcendent love faded from our thoughts than we find ourselves reverting to our old habits of self-seeking and self-interest. No wonder the prophet exclaimed, “Woe is me!” Isaiah 6:5 and the apostle, “O wretched man that I am!” Romans 7:24

Why is Christian love so scarce in the world? It is because its cultivation requires nothing less than the reversal of every instinct of our fallen natures. Love is against the grain of nature. It is against every fiber of our being as sinners. But nature, in the regenerate, is under the higher power of grace. Then let every Christian take up the duty of Christian love with ten-fold seriousness. Our life’s work must be to call down heaven’s help upon ourselves that we may bend toward the great command to love one another. What the unregenerate cannot do, true Christians may and must. ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity’

1 Corinthians 13:13.

Maurice Roberts, The Thought of God, pg 165

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